The Community Core proposes a novel approach to effective integration of community partners and academic scholars into a cohesive body that will address the overarching goal of the Center to understand and eliminate health disparities that disproportionately affect ethnic and racial minority populations. The specific aims of this Core are: 1) to work with community collaborators to build into the Center's work their data need priorities for information on understudied Los Angeles County subpopulations and to assist them in their health planning needs; 2) to engage in a planning process that generates opportunities for cross-fertilization among community partners and other members of the center to synergize research conceptualizations, strategies, and methods of health information dissemination and to evolve a process that drives the Center's direction; 3) to study and develop innovative communication methods that can overcome language and health literacy barriers in communicating about health research outcomes and in disseminating research results; 4) to recruit and train three community scholars each year so as to enhance the skill base in the community and inform the educative process at UCLA vis--vis local community needs; 5) to establish the Center as a useful, responsive and readily available information resource for racial/ethnic minority communities, and the organizations that serve them. To meet these broad aims, we propose to focus on 4 major areas relevant to health: 1) language barriers, 2) exploration of provider behaviors and clarifying components of cultural competence; 3) innovative uses of technology to disseminate health information in a language/ethnic/racially diverse context, and 4) facilitation of 'in the trenches' skills at using and transmitting available health information from both public and locally created sources. Planned activities in this Core include collaborative identification of health information needs, mining available datasets for locally useful health information, development of a strategic communication plan and methods, workshops and a conference, events, development of a community research toolkit, and training of community scholars.